


Equinox

by Fialleril



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Gen, Metafiction, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:46:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2347385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fialleril/pseuds/Fialleril
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Primula liked to watch the stars. Drogo hoped their son would be like her.</p><p>A little metafiction on the significance of Frodo's birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equinox

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of meta/musing disguised as a fic. Thinking about the fact that Frodo's (and Bilbo's) birthday lines up with the Autumn Equinox (though of course the Shire calendar and ours don't line up exactly). This is more a beginning than anything, but I enjoyed exploring Primula's character.

Frodo Baggins was born at the balance point of light and dark, as the world turned toward darkness.

His father Drogo was delighted, and minded to call the child after his own father, Fosco, or perhaps to name him Bingo, a good solid hobbit name, very respectable and appropriate for a Baggins.

But his mother Primula would not have it. She was the granddaughter of the Old Took, and many who met her wondered later if perhaps the rumors were true, that one of the Tooks away back had had a fairy wife. Primula Brandybuck had an uncanny way about her.

She liked to watch the stars, sometimes, a strange but guiltless pastime that Drogo often indulged her in. She knew most of the common names for groups of stars, and even some of the strange names of the Elven tongue. Drogo did not know where she’d learned them from, and he never asked. His wife enjoyed reading, he knew, and he thought it harmless enough. But he sometimes suspected that she had met with Elves or other outlandish folk in her youth.

They had watched the stars the night before Frodo’s birth. Primula lay propped in a nest of pillows and soft woven blankets, pointing out the Plough and the Bear and a host of other stars Drogo had not really paid heed to.

“The child will follow you, I think,” he’d said, laughing. “A lover of Elvish things.”

Primula only smiled. “The stars are not for the Elves alone,” she’d said, but no more.

But on the night of Frodo’s birth the stars had been swallowed in thick clouds and gloom. The midwife was all night in the birthing room, and Drogo was all night at Master Gorbadoc’s kitchen table, keeping his mind from his troubles. When the midwife emerged with the morning to tell him he had a son, she found Drogo asleep with his head buried deep in an apple and rhubarb pie.

Primula named him Frodo. It was a decent enough name, and Drogo agreed, but privately he thought it perhaps a bit strange. But Primula, her eyes shining and her face gleaming tired and radiant, had looked down at the child in her arms and said, “His name is Frodo,” and that was that.

A week after his birth, when Frodo was wakeful and wailing, and Primula and Drogo both too tired to think quite sensibly, they took him outside under the radiant autumn stars. Primula lay back in a pile of blankets overcome by weariness, and Drogo rested beside her. But Frodo grew suddenly silent, his cries dying away, and they looked at him and saw that his face was turned up to the sky.

He was young yet, too young, perhaps, to perceive the stars, but Primula laughed and nudged Drogo. “Look!” she said. “Look at our little star-child!”

Drogo smiled down at her. “Like his mother,” he said, kissing her head. “Just as I hoped.”

And together they drifted into sleep under the shimmering stars in the growing dark of the world.


End file.
